Innocent Birds (15 page)

T
HE
spider, who noticed how disordered Polly’s clothes were, and how quiet she seemed to be, let himself drop out of his web so that he might see what had happened. He crawled along Polly’s body until he came to her face. He waited for a moment upon her neck, and then slowly pursued his way of discovery upon her cheek.

Polly sat up and shook the spider away from her, who hurried to his web again, deciding
meanwhile
that Mr. Bugby was a worse workman than he; or—and there always was this doubt—could the victim sting?

Polly wondered vaguely why she wasn’t
crying
. Why couldn’t she cry? She had cried at other times; she had cried when Fred went away, and he had even counted her tears. But no tears came now to be counted.

When all is broken and rent in a moment, thoughts will sometimes come from the past, of joyful hours, that do but heighten the present misery of the wronged one.

Fred, where was Fred? And she had kept all of herself so safe for him!

There was the time upon the grassy bank, when the honeysuckle scented the shy Madder
lane, and when a cow’s mooing even could sound soft and warm. She had drunk of Fred’s lips then as from a deep spring, so that even the shaggy great head of Farmer Barfoot’s bull Frederick—for every bull of his was called by that name—that peeped over the hedge looked on with awe and reverence when she promised to give all of herself one day to Fred.

‘I will never speak to any one else,’ she had said, ‘and no one has ever kissed me but you, Fred.’

And once, too, but that was in the meadow and under the very trees that Mr. Moody had so set his heart upon visiting, she knew that she had nearly been killed by a kiss. It was a kiss that awakened all the hopes of her body into singing, and carried her suddenly into the magic circle of being called Love and Death, that are the two realities of life. But these realities, that Mrs. Crocker had always bid Solly think kindly of, couldn’t hold a girl for more than a moment or two; for a country girl must work, and so Polly had to go to Miss Pettifer.

Miss Pettifer; the bones; a careful mistress. A careful mistress, who had inherited a nice income from a gentleman who sat all day upon his chairs. Of course she would want to know what had happened to those bones; and she wouldn’t be likely even to forget about the margarine, the sight of which had so much reminded Mrs. Morsay of the Great War that
she was compelled reluctantly to make the
discovery
that Mr. Bugby’s bottle was a
screw-topped
one.

Polly Wimple now looked at these bones in a dull manner. She had held the parcel all the time that Mr. Bugby was after her, her loyalty to her mistress forbade her to let that go. They all now lay about under the trees, and one or two had a little red flesh that still stuck to them.

‘You get quite a lot of meat for your threepence,’ Miss Pettifer used to tell her servant.

Polly wondered curiously what her own bones would look like if they were so carelessly scattered. She remembered how her father had once brought home a bone that he informed his little girl at the tea-table ‘to be a funny woon.’

‘’Twere farmer’s grandmother’s,’ he explained, ‘who did have a foot like farmer’s: only in they back-times farmer’s family weren’t grave-stone folk same as they be now, wi’ their money.’

Why no, a young girl’s bones would never look in the least like a cow’s; and Fred had once said, when they lay together under those shady trees, that she hadn’t got any. ‘You bain’t got no bones,’ said Fred. ‘You be all nice.’

Polly felt her arm; it wasn’t a large arm, but it was plump and firm as a girl’s should be. She touched it with her lips; but was it her own arm that she touched? She wondered if it was. She felt her hair, that had fallen down, and tried to
fasten it. But the hairpins were all fallen out, so she platted her hair instead, as she used to do before the servant’s looking-glass when she went to bed. She was going to bed. There was so much to do that day, so much housework to do for Miss Pettifer. Why, of course, she had been scrubbing the bedrooms, so that was why she felt so tired.

Had the evening come, and would she soon be going out to meet him? Perhaps Fred was come home from Derby? It was a little hard of Miss Pettifer to send him there, but it would be so nice if he came home very rich.

Oh, she had buttered the toast for Miss Pettifer’s tea with margarine; that was a silly mistake to make, and all because she was
thinking
how much she loved Fred.

Why was all so silent? There should be the kettle singing, and Miss Pettifer’s bell might ring at any moment.

Oh, that bell! It would ring so sharply, and always break into the middle of some of her prettiest thoughts about Fred.

Oh, how she had wanted Fred, and how foolishly Mrs. Chick would talk about marriage. And yet even those words of hers had made
sun-kissed
Polly want Fred the more.

‘’Tain’t nothing to hurt a maiden, marriage bain’t,’ Mrs. Chick would say, laughing loudly.

But why couldn’t she cry now?

No, she couldn’t cry; she couldn’t think any
more of Fred, though, because something had happened to her; she was no longer a nice girl for Fred to touch; she was different now. She couldn’t cry; her tears were done with and gone; she was like these scattered bones that had a little flesh still sticking to them.

Sounds now came by, and Polly listened dully to them. Some one was walking in the lane going to Madder.

She trembled, and the steps went by. She couldn’t have called out even though the steps were Fred’s; and they did seem to sound a little like his.

Those steps were gone, and something snapped in Polly, as if a thin golden cord that bound her being together—with Fred’s, of course—had stretched and broken.

The evening was grown still, but with the ominous stillness that tells of a storm that is coming. Polly heard another sound that fell into stillness, but came again more and more insistently. She listened, and the sound grew louder, more weighted with heaviness, and more clamorous in its call for the victim of the night.

Polly had heard the sea waves before when a storm was either coming or else dying down in Madder.

She crawled slowly out of the wood. The mist had cleared for the moment, and the stars were shining. Polly had twisted her ankle during her Struggle with the landlord of ‘The Silent Woman,’
and she now discovered how much it pained her.

But she couldn’t see Fred any more, and those waves called to her.

Something came near that licked her face. She had swooned again, she supposed. Polly raised herself from the ground, feeling better. Tim, the sheep-dog, bounded about her.

‘Go, Tim, go,’ she said; ‘go to Fred.’

The dog bounded away.

A
LTHOUGH
Fred tried his best to feel grateful to Miss Pettifer for getting him to Derby, he couldn’t help wishing from the very moment he set foot in that city that he was back again in Madder.

Even though he had the pleasure, and Fred was a good boy, of counting all the windows in the Derby workhouse—and we hope for the credit of the Madder national school that he counted them correctly—yet, strange though it may sound to those who have a liking for simple arithmetic, Fred was not happy. Besides Polly—and his heart was hers—he missed a sheep. This sheep was a naughty one; it would place its front feet upon the hurdles, and would try to eat upon that day’s forbidden ground whatever there was it could reach to. Fred would drive it away from the hurdles by throwing his cap at it, but the sheep, that liked a game as well as Fred, only tried
elsewhere
to break out.

‘’Tis a badly brought-up sheep,’ Fred would tell Farmer Barfoot, when, by the means of this one, all the sheep were in the mangels. ‘And I’ve threatened to forget to count en one of these days.’

‘If thik sheep were left on bare downs and never brought into fold, ’twould teach ’e manners, Betty do say,’ the farmer replied.

Whenever Fred thought of this sheep he counted the windows of Derby faster than ever.

In a fine town like Derby, where there are a great many windows, there are also a great many young ladies who sometimes, though not often, look out of the windows.

‘When I’ve finished the windows,’ thought Fred, ‘I’ll begin to count the girls.’

After living some months in Derby, Fred succeeded at last in earning two shillings. These two shillings were presented to Fred by a business gentleman whose purse, stuffed with bank-notes to the value of some hundreds of pounds, Fred had found and returned to him. Showing this florin where he lodged, Fred was ordered out into the street.

It was a cold evening, for late autumn was come, and Fred wandered about the town
carrying
his cap in his hand—the new one that he had bought when he first came to Derby, but had never felt his own heart high enough to throw up.

Under a railway bridge, where he hoped to get a little shelter from the rain, he encountered a young lady huddled up in a corner. There just happened to be the faintest look of Polly about the young lady’s hair that made Fred decide to leave Derby the very next day.

He decided to walk to Madder and count the milestones he passed. When one is young and going on foot by road, happy thoughts run on before and scatter the way with flowers. Even though a youth may be tired with walking along the great highway that leads from the heart of England towards the western coast, such happy thoughts can go before him and make the way seem easy.

Besides counting the milestones—and Fred, mistrusting for the first time in his life his own memory, put a tiny stone into his pocket
whenever
he passed one—he saw before him Madder upon the Sunday. His father—Fred smiled, for he knew all about his father’s doubt—would be leaning over the meadow gate, and, though apparently watching mere nothingness, would see all that went on. Polly would come out of the rectory with her head bent a little, as if she wasn’t quite certain of the habits of her new hat. She would walk with Maud to Dodderdown church and talk, of course, about Fred and Derby.

When Fred’s stones began to grow heavy, he kept one large one for a hundred, and went on again counting the units. Sometimes he slept in the same sort of lodging that he was used to in Derby, and at other times upon warmer nights under a convenient haystack.

Passing one day through a long straggling village of farms and cottages, and going by a large green where geese were feeding, Fred
knocked at a cottage door near to a farmhouse with a high roof and red tiles and a white gate that reminded him of Mr. Solly’s. He asked for food.

‘You bain’t never farmer’s boy Jim come home, be ’ee?’ inquired excitedly the woman who opened the door.

‘No, said Fred.

‘Then go along,’ said the woman.

Fred went along; but ‘going along’ wasn’t food, so that at the next cottage, a lime-washed one a hundred yards away, he knocked again.

At this cottage Fred was asked, in almost the same words as at the last, if he were Jim.

The farther he went down the country the more he thought what his own happiness would be like when he reached Madder. He looked curiously at every country hill as if to try to discover any resemblance to the hill at Madder.

If Fred passed any person, simple-minded and poor enough to be walking as he was, whose moustache in the least resembled Mr. Solly’s, he would tell him ‘how he was Fred Pim, a shepherd who once had the charge of a large flock of sheep, and was just then employed in walking home from Derby.’

As Fred proceeded farther he became more and more expectant, and looked excitedly at the rooks. When the rooks flew the way he was going, he fancied that they were his sheep and that he was driving them to Madder, but when
they wheeled round and began to fly in another direction, he called out that they were ‘all as bad as Miss Pettifer,’ and threw his cap at them.

In one village at nightfall, a village that slept beside a deep green hill, that appeared to hold the cottages in its lap and be always crying over them, Fred saw in a window a lamp burning that reminded him of Susy’s.

The look of that lamp, with a mere glass and no globe, and with one side blackened by smoke as Susy’s always was, told Fred more truly than any map could have done that he was nearing home, and he couldn’t help waiting a moment or two to look at that lamp.

And the next day, after a night in a woodshed, he met a man with a club foot, a farmer, who informed Fred, when he asked him, that he and Farmer Barfoot of Madder possessed the same great-grandmother.

Just as a voyager upon unknown seas beholds signs that betoken the presence of land near, so did Fred Pim meet men and other matters that told him that he was nearing his home.

And even when a clergyman, who had lost his sermon on
the way to church, told Fred, who found it for him, that he wasn’t Mr. Tucker’s brother but only his second cousin, Fred’s
gladness
was so great that he hindered an hour in listening to the sermon, that was both long and dull.

A few miles from Madder, when Fred had two large stones in his pocket and many little ones, he came upon the first man whose face he knew. This man’s name was Pring, who was a mender of roads.

The Fred who had counted Polly’s tears, and carried his bundle over the hill to go to Derby, was a different Fred now. His beard had grown raggedly, to keep in countenance, out of
kindness
no doubt, the other rags that he wore. His cheeks were sunken, and his body grown so thin that his own, or supposed father, could never have known him. Fred, who had not looked into any mirror since he left Derby, hardly realised his altered appearance until he met Pring, but coming near to the road-mender, he saw plainly enough that he was not recognised.

Beside Mr. Pring there was half a loaf of bread and some cheese, left over from his dinner. Pring, whose work for the day was over, placed his spade across his knees, and looked at the
implement
with thoughtful affection.

Fred was hungry and sat down beside Mr. Pring. Fred knew Madder ways pretty well, and hoping to get a bite he looked at the spade too, as though it were the one and only thing that he had travelled to and from Derby in order to see.

Mr. Pring handed the spade to Fred, who looked at it still more attentively. The spade was old and worn.

‘Thik spade bain’t a spade,’ said the
road-mender
, ‘for ’tis a maiden. Though I bain’t no man to talk to strange tramping folks, I’ll tell ’ee who spade be.’

A car came by, and Mr. Pring rubbed some dirt that the car had thrown up out of his eyes.

‘Spade’s name be Rose,’ he said.

Another car came by, and Mr. Pring looked at it as he always did at every car ever since he had worked upon the roads. This car cast more mud than ever at Mr. Pring.

The road-mender took the spade upon his knees again and stroked the handle; his eyes blinked because of the mud that had been thrown into them.

‘Rose be got wooden,’ he said; ‘but she did use to ’ave pretty ways when biding wi’ we.’

Mr. Pring looked across the road at a stile in the hedge. He took up his loaf and knife, and cutting off a large slice, handed this to Fred.

‘Rose did tell I to give it ’ee,’ he said.

Fred walked another mile or two and sat down to eat his bread. He felt at home again.

It had all been so real in Derby; even the very pavement told true stories about life, true stories about the girls that Fred had never counted. How real that one was under the bridge—much too real. All the real things of the city had bitten into Fred, with their dull crooked fangs; but he was now come again to where Miss Pettifer alone struck the note of reality.

A mouse peeped out of its hole and began to eat of the crumbs that Fred had let fall. As the mouse ate it looked at Fred inquisitively.

‘You bide at home,’ said Fred to the mouse. ‘Don’t you never listen to Miss Pettifer, and don’t you never go to no Derby.’

The mouse looked round nervously, finished the crumb, and ran into its hole again.

‘Miss Pettifer’s only a cat,’ said Fred, and threw his cap in the air.

The evening was turned to night as Fred Pim walked up the hill towards Madder. He knew he wasn’t returned rich, and Mr. Pring had not even known him as ‘Fred.’

‘But at least,’ he thought, ‘I shall see my father.’ For Fred had never believed more than to smile at his father’s doubts. And then there would be his Polly at Miss Pettifer’s, and the dog Timmy up at the farm. Would the sheep be there too, the one that he had thought so much of at Derby? Perhaps it was even now letting all the others out into the turnips.

Near to the top of the hill, and beside the high banks, Fred picked up a package in the lane.

This was the margarine that had slipped out of Polly’s parcel when she was dragged to the wood.

When Fred reached the top of the hill he threw the packet into the fields.

‘It’s Miss Pettifer’s,’ said Fred aloud. ‘But she’ll have to give Polly fresh butter to-morrow.’

Something moaned behind him in the little wood. Fred stopped, turned for a moment; but the sound not being repeated, he walked on again down the hill.